The 4-Hour Body? Not So Much

When the SXSW Interactive conference begins later this week, it could look very different from previous tech gatherings. That’s because the geek-iarchy has a new book on its shelves, wedged in between Getting Things Done and The ClueTrain Mainfesto. This year’s big nerd book is The 4-Hour Body, by Tim Ferriss. It’s a successor (though not a sequel) to the author’s previous hit, The 4-Hour Workweek.

Workweek resonated because it showed how the information age created the conditions to liberate professionals from the chains of the office, spelling out the steps your average professional could take in order to create a “lifestyle design” that let them work wherever, whenever and, ideally, as little as possible. Its liberation methodology was especially viable for professionals with highly specialized skill, like IT geeks, who ate it up.

Now, with Body, that same Silicon Valley crowd gets a particularly tech-oriented take (he packs the book with software tips) on every aspect of physical self-care, ranging from exercise to diet to sleep. (And more. I could write a whole column or five on Ferriss’ take on sex, but I need those four hours for my workouts.) The book’s uptake among the blogging and tweeting masses has left me wondering for months: how will this staggeringly ambitious book change the notoriously body-neglecting geek culture?

SXSW may provide a very tangible demonstration of Ferriss’ impact, if the geek crowd shows up looking slimmer, trimmer and stronger. But given the extreme recommendations that Ferriss doles out as effective — only four hours of exercise per month, “binge days,” and just a few hours of nightly sleep, to name a few — I had to ask some experts whether following the Ferriss gospel was actually healthy. Not just for geeks, but for anybody.

First, I looked at Ferris eating plan, which he calls the “Slow-Carb Diet”: Eat almost exclusively protein and veggies, make it easy by just keeping a few meals in rotation, and stick with it by letting yourself eat anything for one day each week. I reviewed this plan with Dr. Tieraona Low Dog, M.D., and Director of Fellowship at the University of Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine, and a former member of the Advisory Council for the National Institutes of Health National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine. She’s at the top of the field. She noted, first, that there wasn’t much terribly new or different to Ferriss’ diet, that low-carb diets like this one have been around for some time, and she expects that “many people will lose weight if they follow it, though I don’t think that the diet is capable of all the claims in the book.”

Dr. Low Dog also expressed some concern about “the very limited number of vegetables to choose from, the lack of fruit in the diet and the high intake of meat” since there’s “little reason to limit non-starchy vegetables, berries and apples,” and thought it was “unwise” to permanently remove whole grains from your diet. She also worried about women following his suggested two glasses of wine a day, due to the relationship between alcohol and breast cancer.

As for the binges? “You have to be careful with binging on one day of the week,” Low Dog say. “It can creep into the other days.” That makes sense. Binge eating is by its nature an out of control act. Ferriss, then, is recommending controlled bouts of being out of control. But how many of us really have the discipline (or money) to (as he advises) throw out all the junk food that remains uneaten at the end of our weekly day of madness?

Next, I looked into his recommendations for exercise and muscle gain. Ferriss claims a possible 3% body-fat reduction in a single month by combining the slow-carb diet with just 15 minutes a week of pre-breakfast exercise, and offers a number of specific strength-building exercises (emphasizing kettlebells) that he says deliver big fat-loss and muscle-gain payoffs with minimal reps and frequency. I sent this section to my Pilates instructor, Heather Low, owner of Meridian Pilates Studio and a former Vice-President of the Pilates Association of Canada. “If you followed this to the letter, there’s a good chance it could work,” Heather told me. “But only if you’re already a body person — you know, someone who is used to doing really precise movements.” Her concern was for the more sedentary readers Ferriss’ book targets: “People who haven’t moved very much in their lives are going to have a hard, hard time doing these exercises well. I’d like to try them all myself, but some of them, like the single-leg deadlift, have a real potential for injury.”

Then I checked up on Ferriss’ most outrageous suggestion: living on just a few hours of sleep by breaking sleep into six rigorously-scheduled 20-minute naps each day. I talked with an old friend, Dr. Jonathan Emens, now an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Oregon Health & Science University where he conducts sleep research. Could I leap tall buildings on the strength six cat naps? Jon didn’t hedge: “People are always looking for shortcuts around their physical needs. But we need sleep the way we need oxygen and food. There are no shortcuts.”

As for the Ferriss approach: “It’s dangerous,” Jon told me bluntly. “Setting aside the metabolic, cognitive, and emotional impact of not getting enough sleep, the risk of car accidents or on-the-job accidents alone should keep people from trying this. Would you want to get on a plane if you knew the pilot only got two hours of sleep a night?”

These comments have me worried about the prospect of a SXSW in which participants may indeed be newly buff and slender, but may also be tired, injured, and prone to overdoing the Texas BBQ.

Glibness aside, the popularity of the Ferriss book has me concerned at a deeper level. On the one hand, I share my fellow geeks’ tendency to live from the neck up, and to neglect physical self-care in favor of a brain-in-a-jar lifestyle. Over many years of just the kind of experimentation that Ferriss recommends, I have been forced to conclude, reluctantly, that I am happier and higher-functioning when I eat well, don’t drink, get plenty of sleep, and exercise regularly (a conclusion that has really cut into my SXSW partying, among other things). To the extent that Ferriss helps the geek crowd discover, and even take an interest in, the below-the-neck parts of their body, that seems like a good and helpful thing.

Yet how helpful is it to encourage geeks to take an interest in their bodies if the process involves using self-loathing as a motivation (by looking at unflattering photos of yourself naked) or focuses on achieving the waist-to-hip ratio that makes you most attractive to the opposite sex? As a female geek, I’ve lived through the broader culture’s obsession with physical appearance that is foisted on women, and to a lesser degree on men. By focusing so much on how his recommendations can manifest as external attractiveness — and barely mentioning the psychological benefits of self-care, like the seratonin boost you get from exercise — Ferriss encourages the geek world to embrace surface-level judgements. It’s not about feeling great as much as it is about looking great.

That’s out of step with what makes geek culture sing. The sweetest thing about the geek world is its notional rejection of the quick, superficial judgements that drive offline interaction, and its romantic notion of an online world in which we can be seen and loved for who we are (or at least what we text). We may not always live up to that ideal (chat roulette, I’m talking to you) but we can still celebrate the aspiration to create some realm of social life that is structurally resistant to our society’s obsession with looks and first impressions.

The rising amount of time we now spend online may have caused the pendulum to swing too far: to create a culture of Internet potatoes who remain glued to the screen, missing out on exercise and compromising their physical health. In encouraging the geeks of the world to reconnect to their physical beings, let’s not swing the pendulum too far in the other direction. Even if your pecs are bulging, they can still sport a pocket protector.

Author’s note: I contacted Mr. Ferriss to give him the opportunity to respond to this piece and his staff declined the opportunity.

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